Naked Came the Newsroom: Rest in clover, Mike McGrady.

Before there were shades of grey, there were valleys of dolls and places called Peyton.  And there was a stranger that came naked, romping straight out of newsman Mike McGrady's sense of fun, and fairness.  The time was the late sixties, and as his obit this afternoon in the NY Times reports: 

Mr. McGrady conceived “Naked Came the Stranger,” fittingly, in bed.

“It came after a night of reading ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ ” he later told Newsweek, “which I couldn’t put down because I was asleep.”

Surely, he reasoned, a newsroom full of journalism’s best and brightest could together produce something just as schlocky — and just as successful. He fired off a memo to his colleagues.

Photo from New York Times

Those colleagues (at Newsday) pitched in, some 25 of them, to create a saga of suburban sexual adventures involving a housewife and her parade of unlikely lovers.  Naked Came the Stranger spent weeks on the best seller list and even got a reissue in 2004.  Here's the link to Mr. McGrady's obit:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/business/media/mike-mcgrady-known-for-a-literary-hoax-dies-at-78.html?ref=books